Road To Nowhere: conversation with Monte Hellman (2011)

When the Venice Film Festival awarded Monte Hellman a richly-deserved career achievement Lion last year [2010], it was on the occasion of his triumphant return to the screen with the rich and personal Road to Nowhere. In the twenty one years since his last feature, Hellman’s name has passed before more filmgoers’ vision as executive producer of Reservoir Dogs than as the director of Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), the epitome of that lonely American cinema of the ‘70s; never mind his pair of eerie metaphysical westerns, Ride in the Whirlwind and The Shooting (shot back-to-back in 1965); or the oft-suppressed Cockfighter (1974). He is the secret auteur of American cinema, too infrequently spoken of, his films even less frequently seen.

 “I don’t think a lot about the movies that I’m making and I kind of take the script at face value and deal with it”.

Hellman rolled into Hollywood at the tail end of the studio period, a climate that had discouraged a view of director-as-artist. Most seemed happy that way, professionals at work. He got a thorough apprenticeship in Corman’s back room, re-editing and re-shooting, and remained a film-maker for hire ever since, with a hand in everything from Head to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (he even directed second unit on Robocop). For his most significant outings as director, he enjoyed remarkable latitude: Corman trusted him with the westerns and Cockfighter; and whilst Two-Lane Blacktop may be the refined Easy Rider, the freedom afforded Hellman would not have been permissible without the latter’s success. He prefers to take an anti-intellectual approach to his own film-making, but his Laurel Canyon home is lined with books and movies, and the craftsmanship is mingled with the instinct and emotion of a poet. He may not be the director to run around declaring that his vision must be seen, yet a personal vision is exactly what has emerged in his films, through one of the clearest and most consistent authorial voices in anything like mainstream American cinema.

The title of Hellman’s new film is as neat a summation of his philosophical outlook as any, and returns once again to man’s powerlessness in a world of dubious purpose. Even in his debut, the likeable, low-rent Beast From Haunted Cave (1959), Hellman allowed the two young leads to discuss whether we humans make our own luck, or if our luck makes us. In his next two pictures, shot back-to-back in the Philippines, he has one of the soldiers offers his observation of human beings that “they get born, they stumble around in life for a bit, and then they die”; Hellman then illustrates this perfectly in the second film, the shaggy-dog chase Flight to Fury (1964). Ever-wary of over-intellectualizing, he rejects the significance of the lines however: “They might sound like (authorial statements) but I didn’t write those lines. I didn’t cut them out, but I think a lot of that stuff is really sophomoric: it’s what we talk about late at night when we’ve finished cramming our books in college, you know. And I don’t think you can take any of it too seriously apart from the fact that everybody thinks that stuff, it’s out there. I could take any writer at random and he’s going to write me a line like that.” 

The lines become less explicit than in those early films, but the philosophy persists, in part because Hellman has always sought out like-minded writers. Rudolph Wurlitzer was hired for Two-Lane Blacktop on the basis of a passage in his strange novel Nog that has human interaction break down, with the individual left to plough on alone. That is more or less how the film concludes, but the killer touch was Hellman’s. He’s something of an ending specialist, in fact, repeatedly crystallizing an existential worldview, from the dead man’s shoes of Flight to Fury right up to the voyage into the unknown of Road to Nowhere’s final slow zoom. The last shot of Ride in the Whirlwind has cowhand Jack Nicholson in silhouette on the skyline, frozen in an eternal flight from blind injustice; all his friends have been killed, and he has lost control of his destiny: “The intent was really to tell the story of the making of an outlaw, the making of a gunfighter, and how circumstances take somebody who was an ordinary man and force him into this position.” So Nicholson’s Wes turns perhaps into someone like his cold-blooded gunman Billy in The Shooting. His fate is to end as a small speck in a vast expanse of nothingness in Hellman’s most abstracted absurdist nightmare. “I think that The Shooting is kind of a surreal movie, but I don’t treat it as surreal, I treat it as realistic. I was hoping to do The Trial at one time. My idea was to do it super-realistically and shoot it in Chicago. Once Welles did it I gave up on that.”

The affinity with Kafka is clear, but the stronger one is with Godot, which Hellman has kept close to his heart since staging the first LA performances in 1957. “I think it’s the idea that God is laughing and that our only defense is to laugh back. I don’t know if I believe that the universe has it in for man but I think that I agree with the lines from the Santayana poem [quoted in Road to Nowhere]: ‘in this great disaster of our birth we can be happy and forget our doom’ ”. The doom is never quite forgotten in his films, but happiness can be found in snatches, and the ideal of love, though rarely attained, is held to be worth the disappointments. Cockfighter  even boasts a (possibly) happy ending, one of Hellman’s best for its joyful affirmation of optimism in Warren Oates’ cracking grin. It’s a corrective to the tragedy of his previous film, Two-Lane Blacktop: Hellman fell for Laurie Bird on that movie and the catatonic attempts by James Taylor (The Driver) to connect with her character, The Girl, must echo something of the director’s own. The stunning conclusion holds many meanings, from “end-of-the-road” filmstrip ribbon as asphalt highway, to a logical conclusion of how far film can capture and examine human experience, stripping away the unnecessary until it destroys even itself. But it is also a frozen, cosmic howl of pain, a conviction – momentary in life perhaps, but not here – that even love cannot succeed.

Road to Nowhere is dedicated to Laurie Bird and reaches the same conclusion as that earlier film, with the prison of lovelorn Taylor’s Chevy literalized. Neither wallows in pessimism, however. These are merely the natural conclusions of an artist who, despite doubt as to its point, has sought to render life with honesty and integrity. His commitment to realism is less of the Stroheim school of correct underwear, than simply to tell it how it is. But only a little less. Production design is meticulous and discreet. “It’s just the idea that whatever you’re doing, that it be honest. I think the details are important. Not just for the audience but to stimulate the actors to give their best as well. The more real it is for them the more real it will become for the audience“. Although Hellman was a photographer in early years (a coffee table book has been long gestating), the cinematography is likewise invisible, landscapes fade into the background, and the images flow by as records rather than pictures. “I’m very concerned with the composition of the shots, which is not exactly naturalistic or realistic, and so to that extent my movies have a pictorial quality to them. But hopefully not to the point of taking the audience out of the movie. I don’t want people to notice any particular thing. I don’t want people to say “oh, what a pretty shot”. The backgrounds are very important but they’re all presented in a way so as to be unobtrusive. I don’t want anything to interfere. I don’t want them to think about what I’m doing. I don’t want them to think about what the actors are doing. If somebody says, God it was really well directed, I think maybe I’ve failed, because I don’t want them to notice the direction.”

If the ending of Two-Lane Blacktop was the most startling instance of a Hellman film recognizing its own self, he manages an equally jaw-dropping moment of real-life revelation near the close of Road to Nowhere. This is in itself an achievement in a film that is riddled with ambiguity as to the “reality” of what we are watching. From the off, Hellman dares to waive his own rule of unobtrusive film-making: a disc marked “Road to Nowhere” is slipped into a laptop, we zoom right into the screen, and the credits play out for a Mitchell Haven picture. The time had come for Hellman to declare his love for cinema, for the life-affirming pleasure of both watching and making it. So his own film follows the shooting of the Haven film, which is itself a reconstruction of events that conclude with an apparently bogus double suicide and missing state funds. An insurance investigator and the blogger who logged the story provide additional viewpoints. Variations on the same scene may be reality or fiction played out more than one way. Facts are elusive. And the suspicion that Haven’s lead actress may not be who she seems (twice over!) makes matters yet more complicated. Haven’s film, Hellman’s film of his filming, and events that predate the present action are intermingled to the point where confusion hovers close at hand if Haven himself is not onscreen. “It’s like these things happened almost against my will because certainly that amount of taking the audience out of the story is absolutely against everything that I believe, but here I was stuck with this thing. I had to deal with it in some way and I did the best I could. What amazes me was that we keep taking the audience and saying, OK you’re just watching a movie, stop your trance and come back to actual reality, sitting in a theatre watching a movie, and in spite of that fact they go right back into it. And how quickly they go back into it is amazing. It just demonstrates to me the power of this medium, no matter what we do.  All this instant media and all this mass of information to which that the audience is exposed to, if anything it desensitizes them. And what is amazing today as opposed to thirty years ago is that the audience can still be caught up in this medium. You’d think that they’d be immune by now but they’re not – everything we do is to immunize them. But even the worst of our breed – the directors’ breed – who really don’t know how to engage an audience, they really can’t help it because the medium engages the audience.”

The porous line between filmed fiction and reality has been a constant in Hellman’s career, even if this is a new, dream-like test of its limits. Verité elements of the cockfighting circuit or Laurie Bird panhandling are the most visible, but elsewhere dialogue has been derived from cowboy diaries and idle conversations; unexplained details have been allowed to linger that refer to unused or even unfilmed parts of script; the late 70s western China 9 Liberty 37 was virtually made up as it went along; and Two-Lane Blacktop was filmed in sequence, as the non-acting leads and company travelled the protagonists’ route cross-country, and script pages were dispensed the night before their filming. James Taylor and Dennis Wilson don’t play themselves in Two-Lane Blacktop, but then again they don’t play anyone else in particular (“Driver”, “Mechanic”): Hellman’s direction for actors is not that they should become their character, but that the character should become them. Wilson’s natural insouciance is if anything a little underused, but Taylor’s self-assurance perfectly carries his dealings with other drag racers, and his discomfort at the filming process, along with those hurt, wary eyes, dovetails perfectly with the character’s inability to make a connection. The incomparable Warren Oates gives a remarkably touching performance of insecurity, but for Taylor it’s real.

Haven was called Hellman for a while (as Hellman had been called Haven one summer way back) and he shares not only initials but also Hellman’s definition of the director’s job: 90% casting, and he can’t remember the other 10%. Haven is struck by almost-non-actress Laurel Graham and casts her as his lead. His eye is good: it seems she was already cast in the real-life story, replacement for a mysterious Velma Duran. The part is played by Shannyn Sossamon with a luminosity that carries the film – it has to, because much of the time we really cannot be sure whether we are watching Graham pretend to be herself, Duran, or herself pretending to be Duran, who we are watching beyond this woman doing and saying these things. A couple of times it’s Sossamon herself, talking to her director. The various identities have merged to the extent that it is no longer possible to distinguish between them. Haven is so bewitched that he seems not to care for the truth beyond the immediate here-and-now of being with her, directing her, watching late night movies with her. Hellman weaves a similar spell on the audience through the confusion of plot, chronology and character, forcing us to go with the flow. To introduce his actress, there is an uncharacteristically long empty sequence of Sossaman and a hair dryer at the start. “The intent was twofold. First of all I was just fascinated by the action itself; I just thought it was beautiful. And secondly I used that much of it because I felt it was just a way to get the audience to understand that this was not going to be a music video and they better get used to it now, and then we gradually build up the pace.” We are never much more sure of who she really is than in this opening scene, but neither, does it turn out, do we really need to be.

If the structure of Road to Nowhere makes it sound like a tortuous Marienbad puzzle, it is much more akin to the story games of Rivette (L‘amour par terre in particular). The mystery plot and the permeability of the film’s “reality” are structures to entice the audience, not to frustrate them. “The script was much more complicated than the movie, in the sense that the scenes were more randomly placed. We tried to give at least an identifiable chronology to the framework, which is the making of the movie. So we put that literally in chronological order. And everything else that’s out of sequence is either because it’s a memory or it’s a variation; it’s the director playing with different possibilities of a scene; or it’s just to represent the way things are shot as opposed to the way they are in the final movie, because they don’t shoot the scenes in order. But it’s such a simple story – it’s not that complicated! There was a whole backstory that we did not shoot just because we didn’t feel it was necessary and that’s the one that people have the hardest time with, where the real Velma Duran ostensibly dies in Cuba. In the script we had scenes where we see her being captured by the police and so forth, and trying to escape and getting killed. We just felt that was way too much information – rather than clarifying things it would have just made it more confusing.”

 “I was consciously aware of the fact that some things may be difficult to follow in the theatrical experience of it. But just like when we’re reading a detective story we can go back and check some fact that happened thirty pages earlier, in viewing it on video or DVD or Blu-Ray or whatever we do, people will be doing that, and I realized that then everything that was difficult would be made much easier. Again I tried to make sure that we didn’t use tricks, like in a movie like The Usual Suspects where you’re actually given false information. I made sure that all the information was accurate and true and that nothing would fall apart upon that kind of examination. It’s not a trick movie at all.”

It’s not a trick movie, but if you want to play, it can be a fiendish puzzle. Or it’s a dream of reality, past and present, of stories less important than the people who enact them. But best of all, it is a love poem to cinema, a deeply personal project of Hellman themes exploded, his own exhilarated antidote to the woes of the human condition. “I think I stole that line ‘love poem to cinema’ from somebody’s review of the movie, but it struck me as something I wish I’d thought of myself. I don’t think there’s any better advice given about the work that we do than the advice that Hamlet gives to the players in Hamlet, ‘to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature’. That’s something I kind of paste on my mirror every morning and try to live up to it. But it ain’t easy.”